What was that joke about Firefox again? “We’re the browser beloved for being the only one not hitting our dick with a hammer. Now, you’re probably wondering why we brought this hammer and and took out our dick. Well you see…”
More seriously, I think until the bubble pops, writing “AI” anywhere is a way for companies to attract fundings, and that money is too easy for many to pass.
That’s why I tend to trust community managed distros over corpo ones. I don’t see Arch or Debian pulling this bullshit.
Tho, I’d still be suspicious of the other big private company, Redhat; which is very involved in maintaining Systemd.
Honestly, if it comes to this I’ll distro-hop as far as I need to escape AI.
Red Hat has been all over AI for a while
https://www.redhat.com/en/products/aiNixOS is whatever distro you want it to be. (As long as you learn Nix…)
Love my Fedora Atomic Cosmic, but absolutely we all be watching to see where they go, and if needed will play the distro-hop game in attempt to stay in the AI free zone
Private companies are fine as long as they are run be sensible people.
The issue with Canonical is that they have been shit for a long time. They are being proped up by Microsoft and a legacy that ended 15 years ago.
I think there’ll always be an issue depending on how dependent a project is on a company. Because the main risk isn’t that some bumbleling idiot of a CEO will run the projects and his company to the ground, but that sensible people will take decisions that serve their own interests, but not the interests of users.
Free software creates a framework wherein companies may have an interest in the success of a project and contribute to it. This is a good thing, insofar that to companies, the project is just a tool that needs to work well and to the programmers, the company is just one of several contributors.
In a community driven project, those who take decisions are the programmers who directly contribute to it and who are also usually users. Their interests are closer to those of all other end users. They want the project to work, and that may also be what financial contributors want.
However, if the software is a product of the company, they’ll intend to extract value from it directly. The interest of shareholders will supercede those of programmers and end users. That is why they may take decisions that are bad from a user’s perspective, not because their dumb, but because they have other interests in mind.
Inserting adds is a good way to get fundings from add companies at the detriment of users.
Adding suscription tiers is a good way to extract wealth from part of the users. Adding AI is a good way to secure loans from banks that speculate on the AI bubble, and maybe even from companies like Nvidia, interested in making the bubble last and grow.It’s not a matter of being sensible or not, it’s a matter of whose interest you’re sensibly serving.
Not all companies are chasing short term profit
In a healthy environment companies work to maintain a healthy customer base. Competition is what drives innovation and keeps companies well behaved.
The enshittification of Ubuntu and Firefox these last years have been tragic to watch, even though i no longer use any of them.
Librewolf has done a great job and has a strong stance on disabling/removing AI pieces
But yeah, it’s just sad to always be fighting against the tide
Kudos to its little brother, Ironfox.
This is going to be all about how they implement it imo. There was a specific line in that article “for those who want it”, if they go for an opt-in approach which only then installs the AI capabilities, then yeah okay I don’t mind as an end-user.
If however Canonical implement AI into Ubuntu without being opt-in, then I’m out and never turning back.
Based on what they did with snap I wouldn’t hold your breath
Does anyone use Ubuntu anynore?
They’ve been the evil distro since, what, a decade?
They put out LTS releases which are nice for a home server where you need relatively recent packages and a couple of years of support so that you don’t have to babysit it too much. On a server it’s much closer to Debian experience as you don’t have to deal with snap, flatpak and all that weirdness.
You’d be surprised
Didn’t hey start putting ads into their start menu, search results, or something? This is not really a surprise given that trajectory.
The only ads I notice is that apt shows how many packages can be updated through an optional paid Expanded Security Maintenance. This isn’t very obtrusive but I’m on a 4 year old LTS release currently so things might have changed.
He’s remembering things from Ubuntu 12.10, yeah 14 years ago :)
Oh wow, you’re right! That’s when I quit Ubuntu. I feel fucking old now…
I used Ubuntu back then too but I’m a Gnome person so I missed out on this innovation from Canonical.
I was remembering my Ubuntu Unity days which apparently ended in 2012 or so. Didn’t realise it was so long ago.
Ubuntu might’ve had ads in the OS even before Microslop. Who knows, maybe they even gave them the idea.
All I really want related to AI in my OS is:
- The ability to systematically create file embeddings and use them for semantic search. This tech is now 9 years old, it’s not wildly energy inefficient, it only sucks that when you change the model you need to recreate the entire index.
- A good accessibility interface that AI tools incidentally benefit from
- Accessibility features for humans, like how Apple lets you select text on any image. Or I can send an image to Gemma 4 and the transcriptions are actually quite good running locally (though the model is large)
Why not use Debian?
See also the dick-inna-mousetrap thread. https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112847682153491798
Wow I did not expect that much dedication put into that thread
it’s pretty legendary
God i dont miss ubuntu and the choice to walk away is even more apparent to have been a good idea.
(laughs in void)
